House Democrats repeat flawed numbers on guns seized in Mexico

Resurrecting an often-repeated misleading statistic on U.S. guns recovered in Mexico, a press release sent out Tuesday by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Democrats Press Office on behalf of New York Rep. Eliot Engel renews chances that false information will once again be propagated to demand more “gun control” edicts, both by those who don’t know any better, and cynically, by those who do.

“Engel calls for new assessment of efforts to curb gun trafficking to Mexico,” the release headline declares.

“87 percent of firearms seized by Mexican authorities originated in the U.S.,” reads the subhead, and therein is the problem. One must read deeper into the fine print of the release, or go to the press release website (which, curiously, lacks the subhead) to find that it refers to a 2009 Government Accountability Office report that “showed that 87 percent of the firearms Mexican authorities seized and traced between FY 2004 and FY 2008 originated in the United States.”